Intel strikes back against Windows on Arm

Windows laptops are getting exciting again. Over the past few years, Apple has dominated the laptop performance and battery life conversation, thanks to its transition to its own silicon. Now, Qualcomm has shaken up the Windows laptop market with its new Snapdragon X chips, even challenging Apple’s power efficiency in its bid to make Windows on Arm successful. With laptop makers already eyeing up AMD chips in larger numbers, it really looked like Intel would be the loser in a laptop chip war, but this week, it began striking back with its Lunar Lake chips and calling out Qualcomm along the way.

At the IFA trade show in Germany, it was clear that a fierce battle is emerging between Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm over the future of Windows laptops. On one side, you have Intel and AMD trying to catch Qualcomm on power efficiency and battery life, and on the other, you have Qualcomm trying to catch x86 on app compatibility and push Windows on Arm laptop price points even lower.

Intel kicked off the week with a ton of details about its new Core Ultra 200V lineup, known as Lunar Lake. Intel claims Lunar Lake will be 18 percent faster in CPU tasks over its previous generation, with double-digit increases in performance per watt, too. While Intel made comparisons against AMD chips, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite is firmly in its sights.

Intel claims Lunar Lake is 35 percent more efficient in gaming against AMD’s HX 370 and twice as efficient as Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite. Gaming is a weak point of Windows on Arm right now, thanks largely to compatibility issues. Like I wrote in Notepad last month, Windows on Arm isn’t ready for gaming.

“[Lunar Lake is] the fastest built-in GPU in the industry,” said Jim Johnson, senior vice president of Intel’s client business group, onstage at IFA. Intel decided to show that by testing 50 different games, and its benchmarks claim it’s 16 percent faster than AMD’s best HX 370 chip. If true, Intel is finally pulling ahead of AMD here, but it also claims its Lunar Lake GPU is 68 percent faster than Qualcomm. That’s not particularly difficult to believe because so far, Qualcomm’s GPU has been underwhelming in both gaming and productivity tasks. Intel was also keen to highlight the issues around game compatibility on Windows on Arm. “That was actually very difficult to measure because 23 games didn’t run on the Arm processor,” said Johnson.

Intel’s comparisons to Qualcomm didn’t go unnoticed by the Snapdragon maker. The very next day, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon was onstage at IFA to discuss the Windows on Arm effort and point out that Intel hadn’t used the very top Snapdragon X Elite variant that has a slightly higher boost clock on the CPU side. “We were a little confused because some of the comparisons were done against the highest SKU of AMD, but not of X Elite,” said Amon. “This is actually exciting. I like this competition on performance. We have our upcoming Snapdragon Summit, so we’re going to turn that into a coliseum, and we’re going to have the battle of the benchmarks.”

I doubt that battle will change much on the GPU side for Qualcomm’s existing chips unless driver optimizations magically conjure drastic improvements. At the Snapdragon Summit in October, I’ll be interested to see how Qualcomm will improve its GPU performance in future Snapdragon chips.

GPU comparisons also impact AI performance, and Intel doesn’t want to appear like it’s falling behind on the AI side of things. Microsoft’s Copilot Plus features have been limited to Qualcomm-powered laptops so far, but that’s changing with a Windows update for compatible AMD and Intel chips in November. That should level the AI playing field a little.

“The Lunar Lake GPU is the fastest AI accelerator in a mobile processor, ever,” claims Johnson. The separate NPU chip on Lunar Lake also has 48 TOPS of performance, similar to the 45 TOPS on the Snapdragon X Elite. But Intel claims Lunar Lake has 20 percent more performance over the Snapdragon X Elite in Geekbench AI “because our developers are focused on optimizing their applications and enabling new workloads vs. fixing legacy compatibility issues.” Ouch.

CPU and GPU comparisons aside, the real key for Intel will be battery life. Lunar Lake can have more powerful CPU cores, a great built-in GPU for gaming, and an NPU for AI tasks, but Qualcomm has a big battery life advantage right now. “Lunar Lake’s systems shatter the myth that x86 systems can’t do low power and long battery life,” said Johnson. Intel claims it has slashed its package power by 50 percent compared to the previous generation, driving battery life beyond the Snapdragon X Elite in the UL Procyon office productivity test. That’s not a test that just shows a looping video, either.

If Intel has truly managed to improve battery life as well as it claims, that’s really going to eat away at the Windows on Arm advantage. I’ve been hugely impressed with the battery life on the Surface Laptop 7, and I’ve not had any battery drain issues after I’ve closed the lid or found it powered on in my bag. Those are issues I’ve regularly found on Intel-powered laptops in the past, so I’ll be amazed if Intel has finally solved these problems.

Lunar Lake might even open the door for laptop makers to put larger batteries inside thin and light laptops or improve cooling mechanisms. One of the key efficiency improvements in Intel’s new chips is removing separate memory sticks or chips, baking memory into the CPU package instead. This allows manufacturers to make smaller motherboards, which is exactly what Asus has done with its new Zenbook S14. “With Intel’s latest processor technology, it decreases the size of a typical 14-inch laptop motherboard by 27 percent,” revealed Asus global marketing director Galip Fu. That means the motherboard on the 14-inch Zenbook S14 is now as small as what Asus has inside its 13-inch Zenbook S13.

The final wedge that Intel wanted to drive home against Windows on Arm was app compatibility, something that has improved greatly but is still a weak point for Qualcomm. “You don’t need a website to check if your favorite app will run,” said Johnson, clearly referencing the Works on Windows on Arm website to check app and game compatibility. Qualcomm had some answers of its own here a day later, announcing Google Drive is coming to Windows on Arm later this year and ExpressVPN and NordVPN apps are now compatible. We’re still waiting to see an Arm64 native version of Adobe Premiere Pro, though, and I’d love to see a native version of Discord, too.

It has been fascinating to watch Intel and Qualcomm battle it out this week, while Microsoft’s head of Windows, Pavan Davuluri, tiptoed into both chipmakers’ events to market Copilot Plus PCs. Microsoft pushed the Windows on Arm benefits hard over the summer, and we’ll find out later this month if Intel has done enough to really hit back against Qualcomm.

The irony is that the ultimate chip winner here will be TSMC, the Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer that is making both Intel and Qualcomm’s latest processors. Intel has also announced that its upcoming Arrow Lake desktop CPUs will use TSMC nodes, amid a huge restructuring that’s shaking confidence in Intel’s contract manufacturing business.

Beyond the chip business battleground, I’m hopeful that the real winner will be consumers, who get even better laptop choices thanks to some healthy competition. That’s exactly the kind of battle I love to see.

Thanks for subscribing and reading to the very end. What are you hoping to see from Microsoft in the fall? You can reach me via email at notepad@theverge.com.

If you’ve heard about any of Microsoft’s other secret projects, you can also speak to me confidentially on the Signal messaging app, where I’m tomwarren.01. I’m also tomwarren on Telegram if you’d prefer to chat there.